The Staffing Management Association of Seattle (one of the nation’s most progressive professional associations for recruiters) has selected this topic for the closing keynote session I will deliver at its seventh Annual Symposium on November 9.

I’ll incorporate your views into my presentation and share my final list with the ere.net community following the event. Helping rank my list and identify missing things shouldn’t take more than five minutes and could prove very helpful to the entire recruiting community. Look through my list of 30 dumb things and select the five that you see as the most common and most egregious.

Use the comments functionality following this post to share your answer and also let me know what things I overlooked.

My Starting Point (please select the top five)

1. Using the same recruiting process for different level jobs — it’s a mistake for recruiters to use the same search process, search tools, and sources for every job; tailoring the process to the job is more effective.
2. Using “active” approaches to recruit “passive” candidates — most who apply for jobs are active candidates however, many recruiters make the mistake of using the same active approaches to find the currently employed who are not looking for a job.
3. Not taking advantage of employee referrals — referrals almost universally result in the highest quality and volume of hires, so it’s a mistake for recruiters to discount them. A related problem is spamming employees with referral requests.
4. Not learning the business — top talent thrives in most organizations because they understand how the organization makes money (hint, it’s not selling a product). Recruiting top talent requires recruiters who can articulate the value the business creates and link specific roles being recruited for to that larger picture.
5. Not checking if a competitor is also hiring — recruiting is a zero sum game, so it’s a mistake not to know whether your talent competitors are simultaneously hiring for the same job.
6. Failing to identify and use the best sources — it’s a universal truth that if you don’t have top candidates in your applicant pool, you cannot hire a top person. It’s a major blunder for recruiters not to use metrics to identify the very best sources for each job family.
7. Underusing mobile — it’s an error to underuse the most powerful unified channel communications platform both to reach and support talent engaged in the recruiting process.
8. Trial-and-error social media use — social media is powerful but can produce mediocre results if not proactively managed and focused on the most impactful activities. A related error is spamming jobs on social media.
9. Mistaking software as systems or solutions — software is a tool that supports or automates process, but by itself it accomplishes little. Great efforts require that tools be wrapped in well-designed processes and procedures, which combined make up a system or solution.
10. Not quantifying the impact of great/bad hires — failing to make hiring managers aware of the financial difference of great hires and the negative cost associated with a bad hire can make hiring managers less engaged.
11. Not prioritizing  jobs — it’s a major mistake not to differentiate jobs and to focus on those with the highest business impact.
12. Failing to develop a business case because the organization doesn’t require one — developing a business case forces you make sure all the pieces of plan fit together, and that you haven’t overlooked components. Failing to develop a plan because the funding is easily available leads to ad hoc program development and inefficient use of resources.
13. Not learning fast — recruiting is a fast-changing profession, so it is an error not to continuously learn and adopt new approaches.
14. Not preparing for innovators — innovators are increasingly important, so it is a mistake not to change processes so that they effectively attract and select innovators.
15. Overemphasizing generic competencies — lots of organizations are guilty of this error. In a fast-changing world, competencies by design maintain the status quo. In addition, most are defined so loosely that they mean little.
16. Not identifying  job acceptance criteria — accepting a job is a major life decision, so it’s a mistake not to identify the factors and the criteria that top candidates use to decide whether to apply for and accept a job.
17. Assuming interviews are accurate — interviews contain many possible “error points,” so it is an error to overly rely on their results without secondary assessment.
18. Assuming resumes are accurate — almost everyone agrees that more than 50% of resumes include misstatements or major omissions, so it is a mistake to rely exclusively on the information in them. Doing so will result in some serious screening errors.
19. Assuming that recruiting tools work — it’s a mistake to use the approaches that “everyone else is using,” good recruiters assess on their own what tools work and what tools don’t work.
20. Expecting dull position descriptions to attract — if position descriptions don’t excite, you’ll miss many top applicants, so it is a mistake not to compare them to competitors and not to make them sales documents.
21. Not managing the candidate experience — it’s a mistake to treat current applicants and candidates poorly because it will negatively impact the willingness of future candidates to apply. It’s also an error not to sample candidate satisfaction.
22. Making slow hiring decisions — the very best candidates are snapped up quickly, so slow hiring can dramatically decrease a recruiter’s results.
23. Dropping the overqualified — prematurely dropping candidates who are overqualified can cause you to lose some superior talent.
24. Dropping  job-jumpers – prematurely screening out job-hoppers can cause you to lose some ambitious and rising stars.
25. Dropping  rejected candidates – it’s a major mistake to discard the resumes of top candidates who were not hired, rather than shopping them to other hiring managers or revisiting them later.
26. Not measuring the quality of hire – even if your organization doesn’t do it for you, it’s a major mistake for recruiters not to check to see if their hires perform better and stay longer them the average hire.
27. Overemphasis on the past — it’s a major mistake for assessment to focus exclusively on past performance without also assessing how the candidate will handle current and future problems.
28. Being a requisition coordinator — it’s an error to focus too much of your time and effort on requisition approvals and administrative matters, rather than sourcing and selling.
29. Allowing hiring managers to hire for their needs — hiring managers can be selfish and hire for their own immediate short-term needs, so it is a mistake not to provide direction so that the resulting hires are also the best ones for the future needs of the organization.
30. Investing or developing brand positions that fail to differentiate — it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that most of the employment brand positioning content developed to date makes all organizations seem pretty much identical with the exception of what it is the company does. Most brand positions are overly generic.

It’s Your Turn!

Tell me what you think the top five are from this list or what you think I have missed using the commenting functionality below.

This engaging and interactive program will evaluate your organization from the candidate’s perspective. You’ll learn what factors can influence a candidate’s decision to choose your company over a competitor and discover the tools and techniques to create a unique and memorable experience that engages and captures the best talent.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Most companies are using a hodgepodge of social media ideas, trying a little of this and a little of that, in the hope something works. Rather than proceed in such a haphazard manner, I’ve decided to give some structure to the process by creating five levels of social media effectiveness based on currently available technology.

This hierarchy approach will be further refined over the next few months, but for now use these guidelines to figure out where your company stands and what you need to do to become a social media maven. (We’re hosting a webcast with Jobvite on November 3, 2011, describing the Social Media Pyramid in more depth.)

Novice: to rank at this inglorious bottom level all you need to have are Facebook and LinkedIn company pages with your boring job descriptions posted in some illogical and uninteresting order. Now all you need to do is to get people to follow you, with these followers regularly pinged via Twitter or the social media’s site internal pinging machine when a job is opened. Despite what any vendor tells you, this type of social media program is designed to stay in touch with active candidates who have excess time on their hands. If you have a big employer magnet, it might be all you need, though.

Minimalist: to move past Novice on the social media pyramid you need to have some type of CRM system driving your messaging and do at least two other things. First, be a little different. Second, be found.

At one level being different means your social media site is more robust; perhaps it has a game or something unique to keep prospects engaged, maybe the company vision/mission is presented in more compelling terms; or, best of all, the jobs themselves are a little bit more exciting. Being found, especially for the SMBs, means someone can find your company by searching on Google or one of the job aggregators with just a job title and a location without your company name. If you can’t get this part right, just think of how many prospects aren’t seeing your job postings.

Progressive: now we’re starting to get serious. Being serious starts by implementing a hub-and-spoke model for your social media efforts where prospects are driven via aggressive marketing programs to your page, microsite, group, or circle. The idea is to group all similar jobs into a master job class — for example, all hydraulic design engineers from mid- to senior-level — and then differentiate how you manage each of these master classes. From these master or landing pages you need to offer unique content and drive prospects to specific jobs as they open up via robust CRM systems (differentiated messages depending on master class and the prospect’s job-seeking phase).

In addition to the hub-and-spoke approach, true Progressives offer a means to easily connect prospects directly with employees they know both before a req is open, as well as after. At the Progressive stage social media metrics enter the picture. Tracking source of candidate opt-in and hire rates by channel allows for both the appropriate allocation of resources and as a means to improve the content and process.

Maven: aside from doing all of the above, Mavens realize that true passive candidates, especially the best, aren’t going to partake in the social media shenanigans in similar fashion to active candidates. Differentiation at the job level is critical for success at the Maven level. For one thing, just consider that the best passive candidates won’t even consider another position unless it represents a true career move. In this case a laundry list of traditional job postings won’t get much attention.

On top of the messaging, the process passive candidates use to engage, compare, and select the best of competing opportunities must also be different. From a social media perspective it means the job titles must be enticing, the job description themselves compelling, and the methods of attracting and staying in contact unique. It goes without saying that the process used to connect jobs with prospects through a company’s ERP system is automatic, robust, and professional. Very few companies are at this level, so if you’re one of them, you’re certain to become an ERE finalist.

World Leader: following are the most important components of a social media World Leader program. As you review the factors, rank yourself from bad to great to give your company some type of initial benchmark. If you rank outstanding on each of these measures, not only will you be a certain ERE Spring 2012 finalist, but probably the top dog award-winner, as well.

• Career-focused messaging: if you don’t have a big employer name, assume all you’re attracting are active candidates unless all of your emails, job postings, Twitters, chats, and voice mail clearly describe career opportunities.
• Auto Outbound PERP: a proactive ERP means your employees are formally connecting with the best people they’ve worked with in the past. This is important, since with “Auto Outbound PERP” once a req is opened your employees are notified if they have any strong first-degree matches. This auto-outbound ERP system is more effective since it drives passive candidate referrals, while an inbound auto-ERP process allows active candidates to find employees they are connected to.
• Virtual Talent Community: Whichever company has the best passive candidates directly connected to their employees will win the new war for talent. Building talent pipelines of active candidates is great for filling positions quickly, but not for raising a company’s overall talent level. A VTC by class of job requires aggressive PERPing, great recruiters, true career opportunities, fully engaged hiring managers, and a competitive compensation structure.
• Interactive CRM: Most recruiting CRM systems offer nothing more than the ability to deliver a series of timed, group-based messages. Direct marketing-based CRM systems have the ability to send a series of sequences and semi-individualized messages to prospects based on their job-hunting status and interests. In some ways this is akin to a virtual recruiter assigned to each prospect in your VTC.
• An aligned talent-centric strategy and tactics: The criteria top people (whether active or passive) use to initially engage with a company is different than what’s used to decide whether to accept an offer or not. The former is more about compensation, title/company, and location. The latter is more about growth and opportunity. On top of this, most companies use the same apply/assess/recruit/close process for both passive and active candidates. No matter what social media programs you use, this mismatch will preclude companies from attracting and hiring as many top performers as possible.

Developing a series of social media recruiting programs should be part of an overall talent acquisition strategy. Based on what I’ve seen, most companies instead assign the role to someone who’s social-media savvy, rather than a person who is charged with developing a companywide program for improving quality of hire. As Magic Johnson said at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect, strategy drives tactics, not the other way around. This seems like good advice whether you’re playing basketball, running a company, or climbing the ranks of the Social Media Pyramid.

The company’s shares got no lift from the overall market even though earnings are up, because the employment picture in the months ahead is murky. Murky enough that in releasing its third-quarter financials this morning, company officials estimated earnings for the current fourth quarter would be less than what analysts are expecting.

Monster’s share price opened at $9.25, then dropped sharply as the market digested the news that bookings (contracts for searching and job posting) weren’t likely to increase much in this last quarter and revenue for the year would be significantly less than the company projected in July.

The stock recovered some, closing at $8.83, behind Wednesday’s $8.91 close.

For the third quarter, Monster had revenue of $259 million, an increase of 20 percent over the same quarter in 2010. (The percentage is based on adjusted 2010 numbers, which were reduced to account for advertising business Monster voluntarily gave up. On an unadjusted basis, revenue grew by 13.2 percent). The company earned 13 cents a share (adjusted), or 1 cent more than Wall Street was expecting. Last year, after adjustments, Monster reported earning 2 cents a share.

(Public companies report their revenue and expenses two ways. The GAAP method includes expenses and income that for analysis purposes are one-time costs or are accounting issues that can distort a company’s actual operating performance. The non-GAAP report omits those items. Monster’s “official” or GAAP method report shows it earned 26 cents a share in the 3rd quarter and lost 5 cents a year ago.)

However, revenue for the quarter was less than what analysts estimated by about $5 million.

Monster’s Chairman and CEO Sal Iannuzzi blamed the “macro uncertainties” of the global economy for finally prompting employers to begin pulling back last month. The company first felt the effects in the e-commerce placement of job postings and resume purchasing, and then late in September started seeing customers cut back on their contracts.

Now, says Iannuzzi, the hiring pullback seems to be a trend, or at least enough of a concern that it is prudent to lower the estimates for both bookings and revenue growth. Earlier Monster estimates were based on national and global opinion of strong economic growth. That’s no longer the case.

“Right now,” said Iannuzzi, “there is increasing uncertainty and fear that we may experience another recession.” For that reason Monster cut back on its revenue and bookings estimates. “We believe it is prudent to manage our business on the assumption” that economic conditions will not improve, he said.

However, Iannuzzi said the situation is different from what it was three years ago. Instead of layoffs and other draconian measures, companies are slowing up on hiring.

CareerBuilder, which is not a public company and volunteers only some financial information, said its North American revenue grew 13 percent in the 3rd quarter to $161 million. Monster’s North American revenue was $123,2 million, a 15 percent improvement over 2010.

Although it doesn’t provide its international numbers, Gannett CFO Paul Saleh said CareerBuilder’s international business grew “in the low 40 percent.” Gannett, the largest newspaper company in the U.S., is the majority owner of CareerBuilder. Some of CareerBuilder’s performance is covered during Gannett’s quarterly financial report.

During the company’s conference call with financial analysts, CareerBuilder’s international opportunities were cited by Gannett CEO Gracia Martore, who said, “We’ve improved the results as we’ve been in many of the markets that we are in internationally year-over-year. And so we … see that as a great opportunity to continue to expand upon our international offerings there. And as Paul mentioned, we saw a terrific revenue growth overseas, albeit from a small base, but that’s a real area of opportunity for us going forward.”

The other two leading public careers advertising sites will report next week. Dice Holdings reports November 2, LinkedIn reports November 3.

Ron Katz, of Penguin HR Consulting, and I talk for 10 minutes, below, about what recruiters can do in situations like that. We also get into what exactly’s behind the bias against the unemployed. And we touch on how the perception of HR/recruiting factors in all this.

So says Mid-Market Perspectives: America‘s Economic Engine – Competing in Uncertain Times, a Deloitte survey of almost 700 executives at companies with revenue of $50 million to $1 billion.

A majority of the executives expect both revenue (61.2 percent) and profitability (52.6 percent) to increase next year, despite limited faith in any significant improvement in the national economy. What drives their optimism is a continued focus on cost controls and increased productivity.

Of the 70 percent of executives reporting an increase in productivity, the average saw a 6.1 percent improvement since the beginning of the recession. The majority of executives credit the rise to improvements in business processes (62.2 percent) and technology (50.3 percent), especially the automation of business operations and increased use of data analytics for business intelligence.

Less than 30 percent of the respondents attributed improved productivity to making better hires (29.7 percent) or better workforce training (28.6 percent). As the report declares, “if a job can be automated — if it can be reduced to an algorithm, an application, or a set of instructions — it probably will be.”

While 44 percent of the respondents expect to increase headcount of full-time employees next year, hiring is being restrained, 45 percent say, by the need to wring more productivity out of the company. Labor, say 49.3 percent, is the cost the company is most focused on controlling.

Another problem, survey respondents identified, was the challenge in finding new workers who can hit the ground running. The Deloitte report says 47 percent of mid-market business leaders report difficulty finding employees with the skills and education to become productive immediately.

This is becoming a hotly argued issue at ERE’s sister site, TLNT. A post by editor John Hollon asks, “Are We Short of Skilled Workers, or Is it Just a Training Problem?” The post amplifies the discussion that began here with a reference to an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal by Dr. Peter Capelli.

He argued that employers are wrongly blaming schools for failing to train workers. “The real culprits,” Capelli says,” are the employers themselves.”

What’s interesting to note in the Deloitte survey are the responses to the question, “What organizational changes, if any, has your company attempted to implement since the onset of the U.S. recession?” Of the eight options, 60.8 percent chose “Improved business processes.” That would be where streamlining workflow and automation fit in — essentially the tech over talent decision.

“Improving training” was selected by 37.8 percent. “Higher standards, in terms of skills or education, for hiring new employees” was the choice of 35.2 percent.

The Medium vs the Message

There’s more going on offline than online.

A key finding of the research is that social networking is done more offline than online; the most common type of social networking is face-to-face or over the phone. This is a tough pill to swallow for those who worship the god of digital media, but the conventional wisdom is based on confusing the medium with the message. Social networking is what people are naturally driven to do; online social media is just the mechanism through which it’s done.

One size does not fit all. The research shows that social networkers have different reasons why they use their networks. These reasons are intrinsic to each individual: if you want to engage with them you need to tailor your message to them. If your social media initiatives are designed to reach the widest possible audience, then there’s a lot who will simply tune it out.

It’s About Engagement

The conventional wisdom about social media is that it’s a vehicle to reach the widest possible audience at the lowest cost — 467 first-level contacts connect you to 88,654 second-level contacts and 12,674,812 third-level contacts; Facebook has 600 million users, and so on. Getting dazzled by the numbers obscures the fact that success with social media requires engagement. And engagement means connecting with people who have shared passions and interests. Research on the effectiveness of tweets as a means to deliver a message shows that that happens most when tweets are re-tweeted — which only happens if the message resonated with the person reading it … an engaged follower. A “like” by a friend is more likely to be noticed than an ad, and even more if the friend commented on whatever it was they liked.

And engagement means that people are more likely to talk with their friends about the topic, whether it’s a product or a job, or interesting place to work. This is why talent communities can only succeed if they build engagement. The conventional wisdom about the talent communities is that they should include the largest number of possible candidates, with the idea that some will become employees. That approach doesn’t build engagement. It builds a database. The people in it are not likely to be retweeting your jobs or sharing them on Facebook.

The Gallup research shows that prospective customers are much more likely to try your product or service or advocate on your behalf if they hear good things about you from an engaged customer in their social network. They are much less likely to trust online advertising or corporate-sponsored Facebook pages or Twitter feeds. Candidates will behave the same way — if they’re engaged with you they will mention it to their friends, and those friends are more likely to be attracted to your jobs, more so than any amount of tweeting and self-promotion you may do through SEO for your jobs.

Old Habits Die Hard 

Much of recruiting has to do with advertising; the enduring popularity of job boards is testimony to that. Before that, so much of print advertising was devoted to help-wanted ads. It’s hard work to come up with leads on candidates and then reach out and try and to get them interested in your jobs. We’d all like to just post a job and wait for the resumes to roll in. When social media came along the most natural thing to do was to try and get those jobs in front of as many people as possible. That was the message peddled by ad agencies — the former middlemen in the job-posting business. Hence the obsession with click-through rates, impressions, views, etc. That may work for jobs where the requirements are a pulse and the lack of a felony (and sometimes only the first) but it usually doesn’t work for jobs requiring specialized skills. Do it too much and you’re just filling the channel with noise that no one’s paying any attention to.

Advertising doesn’t build engagement but a focused message, tailored to a narrow segment resonates. Talent communities are most effective when they include like-minded people who share a passion for their work. Do it right and you have passive candidates engage with you in ways not possible through advertising. Do it wrong and you’ve got the social media equivalent of spam.

Healthcare is expected to create 248,500 jobs this year, leading all other sectors including tech. But even as go-go as healthcare is, the pace of job creation there has subsided some.

Nothing surprising there, except that this is India we’re talking about, and not the U.S.

Ma Foi Randstad, the international HR service provider, says India’s torrid jobs growth is slowing up, though the numbers are still at a pace much of the world would envy. According to a Randstad survey of 13 industry sectors, 3rd quarter employment in those sectors was projected to grow by 353,900 workers. But a survey at the end of the quarter estimated the actual hires at 331,200, leading the company to headline its economic summary ”Indian Economy: sluggish but not panicky.“

Randstad’s quarterly surveys cover only a fraction of the country’s 478 million workers, more than half of whom work in agriculture. However the so-called “organized sectors” in the survey contribute a disproportionate share of the nation’s GDP, employing about 35.2 million workers.

As in the U.S., healthcare is the fastest growing of the 13 sectors in the Randstad survey. The company estimated employers would add some 63,800 workers in the 3rd quarter. It now estimates that 60,400 jobs were added.

Only two sectors showed above expected growth: Pharmaceuticals, where 1,300 more jobs than the original 11,300 are believed to have been added, and real estate and construction, which added 1,110 more jobs than the initial 29,600 estimate.

The tech sector, employing about 2 million workers, fell 9,000 jobs short of the 55,500 estimate.

Notes the Randstad survey, “many IT firms (are) becoming cautious in their hiring. This has been further accentuated by the decline in attrition rates since the economic downturn, which has come down to 15% from 25% in the last couple of quarters. Many of the firms are hiring based on their immediate project needs.”

One positive for U.S. and Canadian tech recruiters is that a slowdown in India should make recruiting overseas candidates a little easier. That should be especially true for companies hiring in-country workers to staff their overseas operations.

It should also lessen some of the impetus for H-1 engineers in the U.S. to return to India. Though U.S. companies have seen some Indian expats leave for jobs in their home country paying not much less than they were earning in the U.S., the exodus has been small. Now, with the declining value of the rupee, and the slower pace of hiring, that’s one less issue.

Despite the slower than expected job growth, and a slowdown in the growth of the GDP, from a high a few years ago of 9 percent annually to this year’s projected 7.5 percent, Randstad’s report says “the long term growth story of India is still intact.”

Adds Randstad, “even though a deceleration in job growth rates is now being experienced, in the longer term the economy still retains the wherewithal to jump back — the numbers may be sluggish, but there is no need to press the panic button as yet.”

It got me thinking about a very different — and more important — question you need to ask if you’re a manager.

“I Beg Your Pardon?”

As I approached the hotel restroom sink to wash my hands, a man in a suit turned to me and said:

“I know this is a weird question to ask, but … do I smell bad?”

He explained that he had been sweating profusely because of the hot conference room and was worried that he now reeked and would repel others. While this is never a pleasant thought, since this was an event where you wanted to network with others, he was especially concerned about being perceived as a noxious life form.

Since he was being so authentic and genuine, how could I not accommodate his request? I got a bit closer and took a whiff.

“You’re fine. I can’t smell a thing,” I told him.

“Hey thanks,” he replied and then laughingly said “I figured I don’t know you and will never see you again, so what the heck …”

I had to hand it to him: it took guts to ask someone that question, and actually want to hear the cold hard truth.

So What’s This Have to Do With You?

You might be repelling your employees — and therefore diminishing their motivation — without realizing it.

You might be doing things as a manager that annoy, irritate, or just mildly turnoff our employees. These behaviors:

1. Reduce your own effectiveness and value … because you’re not getting the best out of your team.
2. Diminish your ability to drive maximum productivity and quality while still maintaining high morale.
3. Minimize or eliminate your employees’ desire to please you. They’ll do what’s required, but not more.
4. Diminish your employees’ respect for you.

You Could Be Turning People Off and Not Even Know It

Unless you’re perfect, you’re like the rest of us: you do things and say things that make you less likeable, credible, and persuasive … and you have no idea you’re doing them.

That’s just part of human nature. We all have blind spots. As long as these behaviors remain blind spots, we can’t eradicate them, and unless people are willing to say “You have B.O.” — metaphorically speaking — we will never know.

Because we remain blind to these, we get results far beneath what we’re capable of, both in terms of the quality of our relationships and our ability to get things done through others.

“Who Me? No Way!”

You might be thinking: “What could I possibly be doing or saying as a manager that could turn off my employees without me knowing it?”

To answer that, let me ask you to reflect on your own experiences.

What have managers done and said that have turned you off? What have they done and said that made you respect them less, trust them less, or care less about helping them achieve their goals?

Go ahead, make a list. Then ask yourself “Am I doing any of these?”

I Hear Things

At management seminars, I often ask participants to name the things that their worst bosses did that made the bosses so dreadful. Some of the most frequently mentioned themes include:

1. Acting like a know it all.
2. Talking “at” — rather than talking “with” — people.
3. Not listening, including multi-tasking, or taking calls, while someone is talking to them.
4. Not being open to ideas … i.e. shooting them down without bothering to explore them.
5. Interrupting.
6. Talking down to their subordinates … i.e. using the language and voice tone a school teacher might use with a child.

I Have Unfortunately Seen This One a Lot

I would add to this list something I see a lot from high-energy, extroverted leaders with strong personalities: they talk way too much, for way too long, and they dominate air time, whether one-on-one or in meetings.

A friend just shared with me about her experience with her new boss, and how he “went on and on and on and on” … but never really clearly stated what he wanted from her, nor did he ask her any questions. She left feeling frustrated and more than a little “New Employee Buyer’s Remorse.”

I can recall conversations with senior leaders where there was never a pause in their monologue for me to insert a response or ask a question, and never any interest expressed in my point of view. I would leave these encounters feeling frustrated over feeling stuck listening to something that could have taken a fraction of the time. I would also feel turned off by the person’s disinterest in anything I had to say. I also found myself pitying the people who had to work with these individuals day in and day out.

Are you that person? Research on how power affects people shows that the more power we have, the more likely we are to dominate conversations and interrupt others.

If you’re doing those things, I can guarantee that you’re not just boring others — and therefore reducing your influence and credibility. You’re also annoying them, even though they’re trying to look attentive and engaged.

I’m Not Trying to Be Negative or Accusatory, But …

I want you to ask others: “What can I do to be a better manager?” and “What can I do to be easier to talk to?”

If you are truly sincere about becoming a better leader, if you truly want to increase your ability to increase productivity, or inspire great customer service, or foster innovation, you must maximize your ability to positively influence others.

The only way you can do that is to get honest feedback as part of your game plan.

Let me give you a protocol for getting honest feedback that was born out of a common fear I heard from managers attending my programs.

The “You Know I Went to a Management Seminar” Talk

Years ago, when I first started giving management seminars, I would often have someone raise their hand at the end and say something like this:

“This stuff really makes sense and I agree with it …”

Then their voice inflection would go up, signaling a “but…” was about to follow.

“…but…I’m afraid that if I start doing these things, my people will think I’m just doing them because I heard you were supposed to do them at this seminar.” They were afraid to be “caught in the act” of using something they had learned, and then get labeled as being phony.

So, to combat this fear, I came up with a simple process they could use to both let their team know they would be trying out new behaviors and to ask for feedback. That way, they didn’t have to worry about “getting caught in the act.” It would be clear that of course they would be applying what they had learned, and therefore acting differently in some ways.

I also started giving people language for how to introduce to their employees what they learned and what they plan to do differently based on the seminar. I also suggested they ask their employees for feedback on what areas they think they, the manager, should work on.

I call this the “You Know I Went to The Management Seminar” Talk. So for instance, part of the conversation would go like this:

You know I went to a management seminar yesterday. Well, one of the things we did was talk about things managers do that drive employees crazy as well as things that great managers do to bring out the best in people. As part of that, we were asked to look at what negative things we might be doing and to ask our direct reports to give us feedback on both the things we do they wish we wouldn’t, as well as the good things we do, and should keep on doing.

So first, some of the negative practices I recognized in myself were … not being really encouraging of ideas from you and the others on the team, and not being a great listener.

I would really appreciate your thoughts about those two negatives, and also what other things I might want to look at and change …

Now …How About Having a “Hey, I Read This Article Talk” With Your Employees Today?

You can do a version of the “You Know I Went To The Management Seminar” Talk by having a “Hey, I Read this Article” talk with your employees. Give your team this article and then ask them individually for feedback, or … give this article to a couple of colleagues you trust and respect and then ask them for feedback.

You might not get any feedback at first, especially if you have a strong personality or have been remote in the past, but with coaching, you can come up with a strategy and accompanying language for making it safe for your direct reports to give you feedback. You can also do an anonymous survey, use a 360° feedback instrument, or have someone conduct interviews with your direct reports and give you the aggregate results.

Hey, if that man can ask if he smells bad, you can ask how you can be a better manager, a better team member, a better communicator, or even a better parent or partner. I have. You will be surprised what you’ll hear, and how beneficial it can be to both of you.

Inside this modest, even nondescript brick building is the Conspiracy. I capitalize it because I’m playing along with the preposterous notion that it was selected because of grammatical significance to be part of the official name of the organization that inhabits suite 200 here on Fort Worth’s Magnolia Avenue.

“Conspiracy,” explains the man whose name is also part of the title, “is a collective noun. It represents the whole.” At another point he tells me, “The intellectual power of the organization comes from the whole.”

I do not question his explanation. It has the ring of HR about it.

Maintaining his own name as part of the title of what once was called Starr Tincup signals continuity; a heritage name, he adds. I do not question this either. It has the ring of marketing wisdom about it.

Thus was Starr Tincup rechristened The Starr Conspiracy, says the man. His name is Starr, Bret Starr. A year ago he bought out his partner Bill Tincup, then promptly made partners of four of his long-time associates.

Documents that have come into my possession (and which I share with the world here) more fully detail the name change. The word “conspiracy,” says a document bearing the cryptic seal of the organization — a be-tentacled octopus with an all seeing eye – ”denotes a group of persons working in secret to influence perceptions and outcomes.”

The inclusion of “Starr” is as I was told. The document notes, “While Mr. Starr generated the creative spark that resulted in the founding of the agency, the current partners, consultants, account managers, copywriters, and designers surpass Mr. Starr in every functional area. However, by keeping “Starr” in the name, the brand benefits from historic brand equity.”

This then is The Starr Conspiracy. A marketing agency that offers no portfolio, mentions no clients, and prohibits the merest tweet of where its co-conspirators are traveling. And yet,  it has been engaged by hundreds of vendors to the human resource industry. The document says the Conspiracy has become a $20 million business.

What exactly is this business? Business-to-business marketing for HR vendors, many of them (but not all) software and tech firms. The Conspiracy does not do recruitment branding, employer branding, career fair posters, or any form of job advertising.

Except sometimes they will when a client needs help, says Starr talking to me by phone. (“We talk on the phone a lot,” is an admission I found in the document.)

If you have read this far and not yet seen The Starr Conspiracy’s website, I will pause while you do. Pay attention to the Airstream in the video. Nothing will happen. Click here.

Now is this an agency you would hire to market your performance management system, or a new comp and benefits module, or onboarding program or, or, or? No?  Good. The Conspiracy doesn’t want you.

“We are not for everybody. We don’t want everybody,” Starr declares. “If a marketing idea doesn’t make you nervous. If it doesn’t make your stomach queasy,” he adds, “it’s probably not a very good idea.”

Should I be hearing this? He has already confessed to not providing client references, apparently preferring that prospects vet the company on the strength of the ideas it offers them, rather than the work done for others.

Starr, though is relentless. “We are a good match for companies who understand they have to be noticed,” he says. Companies “shouldn’t try to appeal everyone,” he advises, “because in trying to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.”

Shortly after making that pronouncement, the phone call is momentarily disrupted. Starr mumbles something about the phone service, then declares he has a meeting he must attend. It is almost 4:30 on a Friday afternoon in Texas where he is. What kind of meeting would a Conspiracy need to be holding then?

I hang up my phone and check to see if the doors are all locked.

Starting salaries for professionals in the U.S. and Canada will be going up next year as the hiring climate for experienced workers becomes more competitive and the time it takes to fill jobs lengthens.

Staffing firm Robert Half International  said the average starting salary for white collar professional and support jobs in the U.S. will rise on average 3.4 percent in 2012. Tech positions will see the biggest increase with an average of 4.5 percent. Lawyers and legal support staff will see the smallest increase of the five areas studied. Starting salaries in the legal field will rise on average 1.9 percent.

For 60 years Robert Half has produced salary guides based on information it gathers from its clients, its placements, and surveys of business executives. The five detailed reports produced this year cover finance and accounting, technology, creative and marketing, which includes Internet-related positions, administrative and office support, and legal.

The reports also include Canada, and offer insights on hiring trends in each professional area. Starting salaries can be adjusted for different metro and geographic areas by using the multipliers included in each guide. The salaries are what a new hire can expect to earn. They don’t include the cost of benefits or perks.

Here’s a summary of what Robert Half said about each area:

Finance and Accounting

With hiring expected to be more aggressive in 2012, the average time to fill staff positions will increase to five weeks next year and filling management accounting and finance jobs will take almost two months. Companies say they are having a difficult time finding professionals who have all the requirements, and in some specialized areas, candidates are receiving multiple offers.

However, with the U.S. recovery still anemic, many employers are turning to staffing firms to meet their immediate needs, while they assess business conditions. There’s also a growing reliance on bringing in specialized talent for specific projects and on temporary support staff to handle work during peak periods.

Most in demand is a CPA accreditation. For senior-level and analyst positions, an MBA is high on the list of requirements. Controller and analyst positions top the list of jobs companies most want to fill. In addition, business systems analysts, tax accountants, auditors, and core accounting professionals are being sought.

In the U.S., says the accounting and finance guide, morale and retention are an issue as employees who shouldered additional work during the lean years without getting a raise or promotion are beginning to see opportunities at other firms.

To help retain employees, Robert Half’s survey of some 1,400 CFOs found more companies are looking to non-financial incentives to supplement modest salary increases. Most popular, said 29 percent of the CFOs, is subsidized training and education. Just under a quarter (24 percent) said they’re offering flexible work hours and telecommuting, and a similar percentage offer mentoring programs.

Download the U.S. guide here.

Download the Canada guide here.

Technology

The Robert Half guide calls technology hiring “The Hot List” and says in several tech areas — network administration, security and application development among them — that there are more jobs than candidates.  Two-thirds of the CIOs surveyed about the difficulty of hiring staff reported it was “very” or “somewhat” challenging.

Mid- and senior-level IT positions are among the most difficult of all to fill, particularly for companies who seek skilled tech professionals with an understanding of business strategy. On average, Robert Half found it now takes sevein weeks to fill managerial positions.

The guide also highlights five specific jobs now in demand. In addition to the three noted above, the other two are data warehousing and business intelligence professionals and quality assurance business analysts. Mobile is growing in importance so rapidly that the guide devotes a column to discussing the rise of tablets and mobile devices generally. The demand for experienced mobile professionals will be a major trend next year, says Robert Half, a primary reason starting salaries for mobile applications developers will rise 9.1 percent to range between $85,000 and $122,500.

Least anyone should miss the point, the guide illustrates the section on hiring trends with a flaming red chili pepper.

Canada will see similar, if somewhat smaller, increases, though the demand there is also growing.

In most cases, professionals with specific skills — for example, AJAX, Java, SQL server — can command premiums as high as 12 percent on the base ranges in the guide. And in some areas like Silicon Valley, IT workers can get as much as 35 percent over the average starting salaries.

Download the guide here.

Creative and Marketing

The average increase for this group as a whole is 3.5 percent. However, for the most in-demand jobs in tight markets like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Stamford, Connecticut, employers can expect to pay significantly more to hire top talent.

Hottest are Internet-related positions in project management, search engine marketing, web analytics, site developer, and user experience designer. Video producers to manage and direct projects are also in short supply as demand for video content — for the web, mobile, training, and other services — grows almost exponentially.

The guide says “Finding top creative talent can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.” Among the reasons is the burgeoning demand for professionals in a still youthful industry that forces managers to make quicker hiring decisions and extend offers without delay. To get quicker acceptances, offers include hiring bonuses, extra paid time off, and telecommuting options, in addition to generous traditional benefits.

Hiring managers are relying on referrals and their own networks to identify potential hires, and also on specialized search and staffing firms.

The guide specifically mentions healthcare as a high demand industry, not only for creative staff to develop and manage niche campaigns for patients, prospects, and trade groups, but analytics experts and interactive professionals to develop and monitor online efforts.

Five broad categories covering traditional marketing, interactive, public relations, content development, and design and production are further broken down into specific jobs showing the range of starting salaries.

Canadian salaries are listed for the Toronto market, where much of the advertising and marketing industry is located.

Download the guide here.

Administrative and Office Support

Replacing downsized staff as business improves is the key driver for the 3.4 percent growth in starting salaries for the 60 or so administrative positions included in the guide. Another driver is the ever-growing healthcare sector, says Robert Half.

The company says that many of the workers will come from staffing firms as companies exercise caution in hiring permanent staff. However, managers and executives surveyed by Robert Half say productivity has been hurt by not having enough support staff, which requires existing workers to take on multiple tasks.

Most in demand will be executive and administrative assistants, so these positions are seeing increases of between 4 and 4.5 percent in starting salaries. Employees already in these jobs may see their own salaries grow by at least that mush or more, as 63 percent of HR managers polled by Robert Half said they are concerned about retaining their best support staff.

The most sought after technical skills for support staff, says the report, are: knowledge of database management software; project management; nonprofit management software; SAP and other enterprise resource planning software; and social media.

Download the guide here.

Legal

Firms are being cautious in their hiring, but demand is rising for experienced professionals, especially at firms that reduced staff during the depth of the recession. Corporations are expanding their Internal legal departments to contain costs.

Most in demand, says Robert Half, are lawyers with 4-7 years experience in litigation, employment and labor, real estate, and corporate law. For recent law school grads and new lawyers, the guide calls the hiring environment “challenging.”

The situation in Canada is similar, though more cautious. Compensation is increasing, but doesn’t yet have the attention it does in the U.S.

The guide is available here.

Executives plot out the pathway for revenue goals to be achieved and correlate those with headcount on the sales team. If there are open seats, the math doesn’t work. Each member of the sales team may meet their annual revenue goal, but if you are 20% short on headcount, the department number is in jeopardy.

When salespeople get busy, the first thing thrown off their plate is prospecting. However, when salespeople stop prospecting, the pipeline eventually runs dry. The same principle holds true for sales leaders. When they stop prospecting for sales talent, they run with empty seats on their teams which means they have little chance of hitting the revenue goals.

Panicked, they rush to hire salespeople to fill seats instead of making smart choices. Further compounding the issue, once they hire the salespeople, they don’t have a plan in place to quickly get these new hires up to speed so they generate revenue fast. Some of the sales people make it, and others fail, leaving the cycle to repeat itself once again.

Not having a healthy sales candidate pipeline has a major impact on both the top and bottom-line of your business. Hold yourself accountable for maintaining a healthy sales talent pipeline just as you hold your salespeople accountable for keeping a strong prospect pipeline.

Every recruiting leader wants top candidates, but the standard approach used by most recruiters simply doesn’t work. A more precise data-driven approach that leverages complete understanding of the attraction factors can give you a competitive edge. Market research can reveal:

1. What it would take for top talent to look at and consider your firm/jobs;
2. What are the best information channels influence to top talent;
3. What is required to “trigger them” to apply; and
4. What expectations have to be met before they will accept a job.

Implementing a Recruiting Market Research Effort

Building a market research function isn’t rocket science, but there are certain action steps you should consider when getting started, including:

1. Partner with existing market research and product marketing functions within the business to learn about their best practices and tools they may be able to grant you access to. (Don’t forget to inquire about ongoing coaching and advice as well.)
2. Recruiting someone with marketing research knowledge and experience to run the effort. This is one of those cases where training a subject matter expert the intricacies of recruiting would be less resource-exhausting than training a recruiter how to be a market research expert.
3. Put together a strong business case for additional program funding (it’s unlikely you have enough surplus in your existing budget). Work with the CFO’s office to ensure that the benefits targeted are credible and that your approach for proving ROI is airtight.
4. Decide what information you need to inform your efforts, and what types of data could be analyzed to provide that information.
5. Develop a long list of possible data sources that could provide the data needed to develop the information for each of the key talent segments your function must recruit for. Commonly overlooked sources include desirable individuals who would not consider your firm, current top prospects, current or past candidates, and new hires.
6. Test the accuracy, reliability, suitability of format and cost to obtain of each data source, prioritizing and selecting those providing the optimal mix.
7. Design a simple method to collect, collate, categorize, analyze, and tag the data that will power your effort.
8. Determine how you will make information actionable by identifying not only how the information produced from your analysis will be communicated, but also how it will be embedded in core processes.

The Top 10 Subjects on Which Information Is Needed

The job search process — you must understand how top talent goes about looking for an opportunity. Identify the specific steps they take and the timeline that they follow when considering a job change. Also identify who they consult with throughout the process.

Identify channels of influence/communication – use surveys or focus groups to identify specifically where top talent source their information from and spend a great deal of time. You should learn about how top prospects use:

• Social media — what social media sites do they frequent (i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Yelp, Twitter, etc.) Would a jobs-related message there excite them or turn them off?
• Internet/Mobile — how they use the Internet, both from the desktop and from mobile devices. What online outposts do they visit most frequently? What blogs do they read and what RSS feeds do they subscribe to? Do they listen to podcasts? What electronic forums/chat rooms do they frequent?
• Media — what magazines, publications, journals or newspapers do they read, either the paper or online version? What radio or TV programs do they tune into? Would they read an ad or must a mention be within the narrative content?
• Message preference — what type of messages will they read, ignore, or reject (i.e. electronic e-mail, text, video, tweets, Facebook posts, voice or even snail mail)? Under what conditions would they return a direct message from an unknown recruiter?
• Job sites — what job feeds do they use and what job boards (if any) do they visit frequently looking for a job? On what sites do they post their resumes? What must a job post description contain to get them excited?
• Corporate career sites — what does it take to get them to visit a corporate career/ jobs site? What factors will cause them to drop out before applying?
• Professional association/trade events — what organizations do they join and what meetings do they attend (professional or social)? Would they ever attend a job fair?
• Employer rating sites — what employee rating or rant sites do they visit? Does the information change their job search? (Glassdoor, Jobitorial, etc.)
• Videos — where do they view videos (i.e. YouTube or Flickr)?
• Talent competitors — what firms do the target candidates consider during their job search? Which firms do they finally select?

Identify the message that is required to get their initial attention — use your research to identify what a message must look like and contain to ensure that a quick glance at it will get your target’s immediate attention. After developing some sample messages, use a focus group to pre-test them.

Identify what excites top prospects about a job or company — to refine your messaging you must identify what factors about an industry, company, or job excite your target audience enough to drive them to apply, i.e. high pay, job security, interesting work, a green environment, a great location, an opportunity to learn, etc.)

Identify possible “turnoffs” — in addition to understanding factors that excite, you must also identify the factors that are turnoffs. Because you cannot control the information available on the Internet, you must first find out what negatives about your firm and jobs are easy to find, and develop/test “countering messages” to make sure they successfully overcome published negatives.

For not-looking prospects, identify what it takes to get them to enter the job-search process — if you don’t know already, currently employed individuals who are “not active lookers” cannot be attracted using active approaches. If you are targeting individuals who are not actively seeking jobs, it is critical that you identify the specific “triggers” that would excite them enough to enter into job search mode.

Identify the factors that cause top prospects to take the time to apply — it takes a lot more to get a top prospect or a non-job-looker to take the time required to apply for a job. As a result, your research must identify the drivers or factors that will overcome their natural resistance to applying for a job. Once you identify those factors, prepare and pretest your messages to ensure that they drive candidates to take desirable recruiting actions like visiting your website, applying for a position, or making a call to a recruiter.

Identify the best ways to identify potential referrals — because employee referrals produce such a high volume and improved quality of candidate, use your market research tools to identify the best approaches for identifying and selling referrals. Provide that information to your employees so that they can target their referral efforts.

For active candidates, identify where they see job information — although it takes less work to get active candidates to apply, the very best actives have numerous firms in mind. As a result, use your research methods to identify the specific places and locations where your top “active prospects” would likely see and read an announcement of either an open position or a recruiting-related event. You should also consider putting an identifying code, phone number, or unique web address in each message in order to allow you to later identify which ones actually drew the most interest.

Don’t forget follow-up market research — in order to ensure that you “got it right” and to continually improve, gather follow-up source and influence information from a sample of applicants, candidates, and finalists. In addition, always ask new hires during onboarding what factors attracted them, caused them to say yes, and what factors almost caused them to say no. Use this information to refine both your market research and your recruiting process.

Final Thoughts

Recruiting leaders can learn a lot from competitive fishermen. You cannot even begin to be a mediocre competitive angler without fully understanding the interests, locations, habits and feeding routines of your target — i.e. the trophy fish. You can of course use intuition or luck, but the best competitive fishermen have long ago shifted to the scientific approach, which includes depth finders, temperature gauges, and electronic fish finders.

In the same light, recruiting must move away from traditional unstructured trial-and-error approaches and instead shift toward more scientific and data-driven research approaches. If you are among the majority of recruiting leaders who have hiring managers continually complaining that they are not seeing top candidates, your lack of market research and not “fully understanding your prospects/candidates” may be to blame. As the job-search process becomes more complex and global, you may soon find that there is no alternative other than adopting a market research model in the recruiting function. Don’t wait too long. There simply won’t be time to catch up.

Hiring managers can afford to thoroughly assess candidates, but they still need to proactively recruit.

Successful recruiters can manage this unique employment market by melding the initial assessment and sourcing through a dual-purpose recruitment tool: ideal profiles.

The ideal profile is not about elevating nice-to-haves to must-haves in your list of job requirements. It’s about using your knowledge of a top-performer KSAs and competencies to target your recruiting and do a more thorough, objective assessment of candidates.

What Is an Ideal Profile?

An ideal profile is 4-6 easily observable characteristics (items) that top performers in a given job share. You should be able to observe them from a candidate’s resume, application, or screening interview. They need to be logically (not just statistically) connected to success on the job.

Each characteristic is written in a format similar to SMART objectives.

Here’s an example of an ideal profile characteristic for an outside sales job:

“Active in 3 community groups for over 1 year.”

It’s specific, measurable, and time-related, but how do we know it’s achievable and realistic?

These last two factors are determined by an analysis of the top-performing incumbents in the job. This analysis can be very formal: thorough job analysis, or statistical analysis of bio data information. Or, less formal: reviewing top performers’ resumes and applications, and interviewing top performers. One quick note: if you are interviewing a top performer, he/she has to frame their answers to reflect their situation before they were hired, not 5 or 10 years into the job.

Another important consideration is the availability of the characteristic in the job market vs. your needs. Remember we are serving two masters here: sourcing and assessment.

Why Build an Ideal Profile

The ideal profile can:

• target your sourcing initiatives to where you are most likely to find candidates who possess the ideal profile characteristics
• better predict job success than pet theories, or gut hunches, because it is based on proven top-performer characteristics or behaviors
• increase acceptability among hiring managers who can relate candidates’ backgrounds to proven job success factors
• set a common standard for all candidates making candidate reviews more effective and efficient while treating all candidates fairly
• increase your recruitment process’ defensibility because it rests on job related behaviors of top-performing incumbents
• enhance your overall recruitment process without adding to recruitment costs

Building Your Ideal Profile

Best practices require compliance. Find a champion early on who can and will motivate hiring managers to use the ideal profile.

Conduct preliminary research into possible items for the Ideal Profile, as described above.

Your next step is to assemble a team of hiring managers, SMEs, and your champion. Based on my experience facilitating these meetings, you should be able to create a working ideal profile for one job in a single 2-hour meeting:

• Kick off the meeting with the champion, discussing: a statement of the business/staffing challenge; what an ideal profile is; and how it will address the staffing challenge. Set the meeting objective: to create an ideal profile for such and such a job.
• Come prepared to present your findings from preliminary research into likely items to include in the ideal profile. This will be your conversation-starter.
• Once the individual ideal profile items are established, the formula for rating/ranking candidates needs to be established. For example, will you require all ideal profile items to be met? Or, four of five?

How to Maximize the Impact of the Ideal Profile

As a recruiter, I have always believed in an all-hands-on-deck, everybody-recruits approach. Given this, here are some ways to use the ideal profile:

• Post the Ideal Profile in your office for co-workers to see
• Hold meetings with management to explain the process
• Incorporate the ideal profile into your referral program initiatives
• Hand out wallet-sized, laminated copies of the ideal profile of target jobs to all employees
• Discuss the ideal profile with your Centers of Influence in the community and with external recruiters
• Place a copy of the ideal profile in new-hire-orientation packets next to the description of your referral program
• Establish networks with community and business groups that are aligned with your ideal profile characteristics
• Build your resume/application review around the ideal profile and structure your initial interview to determine if the candidate meets the profile items

Important Considerations

The ideal profile’s primary use is to focus recruiters’ and hiring managers’ attention on high-potential candidates. It is a starting point. The ideal profile can help you target your candidate search and more quickly and objectively review a mountain of resumes. It is not a replacement for a multi-hurdle assessment process; it is the beginning of one.

As with any assessment tool, fairness is key to avoiding adverse impact and third party interventions. Keep your metrics up to date and be prepared to make adjustments as needed to be in compliance.

Even if you’ve done an in-depth analysis to create your ideal profile, things change: organization culture and goals, products, consumer markets, the job market. Track your results. See which ideal profile items or grouping of items work best in finding high-potential candidates and predicting success on the job. Plan on refining your profiles annually or sooner in a high-volume recruiting situation.

Avoid the use of personality attributes in building your ideal profile. Focus on observable behaviors. With the exception of “extroversion,” research tells us that most of us aren’t very good at correctly identifying personality characteristics from an interview, much less by reviewing a resume or application. Remember the old saw from Psych 101, “People do the same thing for different reasons and different things for the same reason.” Stick with proven top-performer behavior on your ideal profiles.

Many applicant tracking systems give you the ability to ask candidates questions and “pass” or “reject “ them based on how the questions are answered. Your ideal profile items may be used in your ATS. However, at least initially, I’d avoid rejecting candidates based on their answers to the ideal profile questions. Where your ATS allows, a better strategy is to score the answers and start your applicant reviews with the highest-scoring candidates and then work your way down the list.

The ideal profile is a productive sourcing and assessment tool for our times. It is a cost effective way to target high-potential candidates in a fair, defensible manner. Give it a try. It may just be a far better tactic than you have ever done before.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Facebook has launched a page, facebook.com/socialjobs, which features resources and information for job seekers from the coalition’s other partners: The National Association of Colleges and Employers, the DirectEmployers Association, and the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, along with the Labor Department. Facebook plans to create public service announcements to promote its services in the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates, which, according to CNN Money, are Michigan, Rhode Island, California, South Carolina, Oregon, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Alaska, and Florida. Included in Facebook’s list of initiatives is this intriguing item:

Professional recruiters are citing an increasing number of independent studies claiming there is no difference in employee quality between internal and external recruiters; so, they argue, why should organizations hire full-time internal recruiters when external ones deliver the same results … cheaper? If I were an executive looking for ways to reduce costs, that argument would resonate with me. So, if you have anything to do with recruiting in your organization, how you react to this crisis could make a big difference to your career.

Same Old Same Old

Recruiters (both inside and outside) are like frogs swimming in a pot of cold water. Experiencing slowly rising temperatures, they are totally unaware they are about to be cooked. (Actually, I never boiled a frog, so I’m taking this story at face value). In fact, the last recruiting conference I attended was utterly packed with sourcing candidates and noticeably shy on evaluating them. When I buttonholed both recruiters and sourcers about the importance of qualifying candidates, their eyes would literally glaze over. They either knew it all … or cared less. I emphasize this story because I have not yet met a line manager who thinks recruiting is doing a good job qualifying candidates. And, guess who controls the money?

Aside from sourcing, the traditional method of hiring is to screen a pile of resumes, run applicants through interviews, and do background checks. We all know it’s easy to fake interviews, and results are mostly personal opinion. Furthermore, you don’t need research to know about half of new hires fail to meet expectations. Just look around. Is it any wonder HR outsourcing is a growing industry?

Nuts and Bolts

I did not invent best-practice hiring tools. They evolved from many years of research that, in my experience at least, most recruiters blow off as being too much work. Best practice starts with knowing critical skills associated with each job, then measuring them with hard-to-fake behavioral interviews, tests, simulations, and exercises. Does this process ensure 100% perfect hires? That would be nice, but no. There are simply too many factors that affect the future. Best practices significantly reduce the number of hiring mistakes. However, one fewer hiring mistake means one additional highly productive employee. Put another way, we know in a typical organization that 20% of the people produce 80% of the results. So, imagine what it would be like if that number was reversed to where 80% of the people were top-notch.

The reasons for poor performance are seldom the employee’s problem. He or she was coached to say anything to get a job; job competencies were unclear; and interviews were easy to fake. Imagine that!

Best practice hiring tools are different: they are considerably more accurate than traditional interviews, highly focused, and hard to fake. If you want management to consider recruiting or HR an invaluable department, I suggest ignoring job titles, organizing jobs into families (i.e., jobs with similar competencies), studying each family to identify job-critical competencies (i.e., ones that can be measured), developing reliable and trustworthy measurement tools, setting professional cut-points, and training your people how to use them.

Still need to use a professional recruiter from time to time? Professional recruiters usually have access to impressive networks or are able to screen high volumes of candidates. Let them know, however, that you will require each submitted candidate to successfully pass your best-practice screen. Don’t be surprised of instead of the usual 2-3 candidates, you have to test about seven to find the right-skilled person. Will the recruiters complain? Probably. But they don’t have to live with the consequences of a bad hiring decision.

Piece of Cake…Not!

You might not have the expertise in-house to set up a best-practice system. In that case, consider hiring a psychometric expert to get you started. I’m not referring to freelance salespeople who market out-of-the-box tests. They are probably well-intentioned, but limited in their range of tools, and totally unaware of limitations (e.g., if the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail). Professionals can be identified by career and academic credentials, professional memberships, time spent interviewing people doing the job, use of different tools, professional validation processes, documentation, knowledge of the DOL Uniform Guidelines, and use of tests specifically developed for predicting job performance.

The entire investment of a best-practice hiring system is often recovered in 60-90 days. Isn’t it worth it to cut-through the sales-pitch and get the employee you actually thought you were getting?

Dead or Alive?

Is HR dead? That depends. Keep up the same-old practices, and the answer is probably, “Yes.” Move into the 21st century and master best practices, and I predict you will become managements’ new BFF.

After a Tuesday night party worthy of a last century Silicon Valley event, a bleary-eyed audience was brought to its feet by former basketball great and now-successful businessman Magic Johnson. Roaming the cavernous convention hall, he mixed photo ops with motivational lessons from his life, which took him from high school standout to Laker star and now to business success as the CEO of multi-million dollar development companies that work largely in inner city neighborhoods.

He offered up such chestnuts as  ”It’s not enough to deliver … you have to overdeliver”; “losers lose and winners win”; and others as he told his life story. It was an entertaining almost 90 minutes that went into overtime as Johnson took questions, hustling over to each person to make sure they could get a picture of themselves with the NBA legend.

A more serious and sober panel followed, talking about, of all things, data. Johnson’s razzle-dazzle was a tough act to follow, but what the session offered was a glimpse into the future for HR and, very plainly, for LinkedIn.

The crux of what the panelists had to say is that we are swimming in data, more data than has ever before existed in the history of the world, and companies are just now beginning to learn how to effectively mine it for competitive purposes.

Four very smart people shared the stage — Reid Hoffman, co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn; Tim O’Reilly founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Michael Chui of McKinsey, and Josh Bersin CEO of the HR consulting firm Bersin & Associates. Analyzing all the recruiting and employee data that companies gather has been a powerful trend in HR for years, but from what the panelists said, the information already in company servers and HR hard drives has barely been tapped.

Companies that learn how to use it will be able to make decisions about all sorts of business issues, not the least of which is workforce planning and recruiting. Bersin, the moderator, naturally enough opened the session with a reference to Moneyball, the movie about how the Oakland A’s mined statistical data to put together a winning team on a shoestring (as Major League Baseball goes) budget.

The session, quipped Bersin, should be called “Moneyball comes to HR.”

The sit-up-and-take-notice moment came when LinkedIn demonstrated how the company is mining the 120 million+ profiles and other data it has and making it available for recruiters. Go into LinkedIn Skills and do a search yourself and you’ll discover the rich information that results. The demo search for “android” turned up ranked lists of LinkedIn members who are professionals in the field, as well as lists of additional skills that android experts list in their profiles. Not sure what companies hire mobile experts? The Skills results page tells you. Same for where they are located and more.

A recruiter could use this data in multiple ways, including compiling skills checklists, discovering the companies that have mobile professionals on staff, the groups they join, and, of course the names of professionals whose connections they may be able to leverage.

Skills is in beta, so expect some hiccups. My own search for “editors” included a Wikipedia reference to a British rock band by that name. Still, Skills is a useful resource as it is now, and it hints at the even deeper data LinkedIn has.

As the panelists noted, every company has some of that same kind of information about its workforce. Mined and, as Chui said, integrated with data from outside the company, data such as that available free from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, then, as he maintained, “It really matters on a bottom-line basis.” Big data,” he said, “is a big deal.”

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• Requisition load — Most corporate recruiters cover between 20-40 openings, with some supporting up to 100 positions. As a result, recruiters don’t have the opportunity to spend the quality time recruiting that they would like. A recruiter can’t effectively and proactively support 40 openings.
• Incentive structure — Incentive pay on the corporate side does not reflect the impact that a top-notch recruiter can have on an organization. As a result it becomes nearly impossible to attract top agency recruiters to the corporate side. With financial incentives (bonuses) not closely tied to results (hiring top-notch candidates more efficiently) companies will always struggle with recruiter motivation. Said another way, good recruiters are worth every penny they earn. Corporate recruiters are typically eligible for annual or quarterly bonuses, so the timing of the reward is not closely aligned to result. Several corporate recruiting departments have implemented scorecards to create differentiated compensation for their top performers; however, they need to move more closely to a pay-per-hire model in order to get the results they want. Unfortunately much of this tracking is activity-focused and not results-focused. If corporate recruiting departments could implement a similar compensation structure as agencies (lower base salary, higher bonus structure), they would definitely reap the benefit. And in the end, organizations would hire more top talent at a lower cost per hire.
• Recruiter skill set — Corporate recruiting leaders have got to get to a point where they aren’t seen as just another HR function. Good recruiters, typically, are not the best “HR people” because they like the hunt and financial rewards that go with finding the best people. Typically this is not the mentality of a good HR generalist who is typically very process-focused. Once dedicated recruiters are compensated appropriately, developing/growing recruiters becomes a much easier task. They will see that the top paid recruiters are also the ones who are best at cold calling, networking, closing the candidate, salary negotiation, etc. and will seek development opportunities out for themselves. Most training dollars are wasted on recruiters who simply don’t have the time or motivation to change their recruiting approach.
• Poor recruiting process — Too many corporate recruiting departments are still built around post and pray. I don’t think it will come as a surprise that a lot of corporate recruiters post their positions and simply phone screen those who apply. Given the requisition loads it’s understandable why many corporate recruiters take this approach. Clearly this approach does not garner top talent, but it also provides the greatest opportunity for third party recruiters to add value. And the area that recruiting leaders must address immediately.
• Distractions – Corporate recruiters are tasked with a lot more than just recruiting. They may be pulled into overflow HR “stuff” (employee relations, open enrollment, compensation studies, etc.) that takes time away from their core responsibility. As long as corporate recruiters are tied to the HR function, they will be pulled in as HR pinch hitters. Additionally, corporate recruiting departments have a lot of reporting that they must commit time to, including corporate/departmental reports, OFCCP, EEO audits, and in many cases internal audit. These reports are time killers. Recruiting functions work best when they are supported by a dedicated administrative assistant to handle the details (offer letter creation, interview scheduling, paperwork, input in HRIS, etc) so recruiters can focus their time on actually recruiting.

In closing, don’t interpret any of this article to say corporate recruiters don’t work hard. Most of the ones I know do truly work hard, but they don’t have the recruiting skill set, motivation, and focus (see points above) to truly be successful to the degree their organizations need them to be.

In full accountability, a good part of these challenges are created by the recruiting function (or at least recruiting leadership) itself. We’ve not been able to provide enough on the value proposition side to say “leave us alone” when it comes to HR distractions. We’ve also not been able to create appropriate compensation structures to attract and retain the best recruiters in the market. I’m not completely sold that recruiting should be rolled into HR at all.